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A lot of people telling me that it's well and good to hold onto your voice but people gotta eat and I'm like, you're educating the wrong person. I've left multiple comfortable positions in my life, lost more. I've only ever lived paycheck to paycheck. I hear you. Hear me, now.
The world is hungry for your voice. Whether it knows it or not. It seldom if ever pays the bills and it never has. Those rare, obvious examples of people who've done it speak more to its precious scarcity. This isn't career advice. It's affirmation your voice has enormous value.
At the end of the day, I don't want to be rich and famous, I want my family to be okay and my kids to like themselves and care for others. And the writing? I want it to be a diary of who I was: stretch marks and scars denoting the places I've grown like pins in a map. That's all.
So anyway, I don't know how to succeed at writing in any traditional sense. But I also can't stop doing it. I hope it has value for others but really, at the end of the day, whatever it is, it's mine for better or worse.
I guess the moral of this little melancholy screed is whatever you do for a living, I hope you still have a creative outlet. A lot of my favorite artists didn't think they were and left notebooks full in dusty trunks in forgotten attics. Kafka asked his buddy to destroy it all.
Equating creation with commerce is a specific kind of death. Survive, of course survive. And fill the gaps with your art. I promise you're not alone.
